Connotations 18.1-3 (2008/2009)

Henry James’s Double-Bind: Chasing Possibilities in “The Jolly Corner”
namely that there is no unity in the might-have-been; it cannot be
fixed, not even in fiction. Its beauty and its most exasperating feature
is its “incalculability,” its incommunicability. The best he can do is to
make him stare at a monstrous formless synthesis which is not, however,
the sum of its parts, since they cannot coexist in any single form.
Once you look, the cat is no longer both dead and alive, the magic of
the tale is lost, but if you don’t look there is no tale.
Regaining consciousness after the encounter, Brydon has returned
“from further away than any man but himself had ever travelled”
(428). He has momentarily ventured outside the “tin mould” of life
where, in Strether’s words in The Ambassadors, “a helpless jelly, one’s
consciousness is poured” (218). What James’s “poor gentleman [has]
attempted and suffered in the New York house” (Critical Prefaces 258)
is what James has suffered and attempted—an attempt doomed to
failure but all the more alluring for it—in his house of fiction; and he
has, like his character, come back from further away than any man has
travelled. But neither of them has come back empty handed. Brydon’s
knowledge is likened to a “great inheritance” which he can “lie and
watch […] grow” (429), and James himself has managed to contain in
a concise and structured form, if not all the possible roads not taken,
at least his idea of all the roads not taken, and to show us a singular
truth:
there are many roads leading to Self-representation and many vehicles
available for transportation, each one capable of getting us there; just don’t
expect them all to take us to the same place. (Battersby 43)
NOTES
Hellenic Open University /
Athens School of Fine Arts
1 Hamlin Garland recounts in Roadside Meetings James’s words: “I would steep
myself in America, I would know no other land. I would study its beautiful side.
The mixture of Europe and America which you see in me has proved disastrous”
97